Blog: ABC hit show has unique following

Blog: ABC hit show has unique following

A new season of ABC’s hit show “Scandal” premieres tonight, and after a rough start, found a unique following online.

The hour-long drama follows the very complicated life of Olivia Pope, who fixes everyone’s problems but her own.

Her main problem would be that she is in love with the President of the United States, Fitzgerald Grant.

Olivia is, by job description, a fixer or crisis manager. She comes into people’s lives at the worst possible time, when they are the leading suspect in a murder or caught in the middle of a failing corporation, and makes everything better.

She has connections all over the place and a team that helps her handle all of these problems, but it is her gut and sharp attention to detail that makes all of her cases successful.

There is just one problem – President Grant keeps trying to leave his wife for her and end his political career. A normal person would be okay with this or even want it, but not Olivia, not after everything she put into getting him elected.

Not only was Fitz a client, which means she worked her butt off to get him looking presentable to the people, but she and a group of advisers on the campaign rigged the election so he would win. So she will stop at nothing to keep him in office, even bruising her own heart.

“Gladiators,” what “Scandal” fans call themselves, have made this show go from unheard of last year to one of the most anticipated fall premieres this season.

The tactics behind the sudden success of the show have to do with the first two seasons being easily accessible Netflix and the very active social media campaign of ABC.

People now get caught up so fast through mini-marathons and join in on the live action of new episodes. The cast participates in live-tweeting every Thursday night when the episodes air, answering questions and even making comments. Fans tweet the hashtag #AskScandal or even @ScandalABC (279,563 Followers) to get a quick response and get a chance to feel connected to the show even more.

At the end of last season, episodes had an average of 130,000 tweets and 2,200 tweets a minute according to The Hollywood Reporter.

On some major cliffhangers, when the president was shot or when there was a mole in the White House, there were more than a million tweets with specific hashtags like #WhoShotFitz or #WhoIsTheMole, according to Buzzfeed.

The social media campaign doesn’t stop there though – the show has thousands of followers on Instagram (@scandalofficial, 287,000 likes on photos) and more than a million likes on Facebook (1,183,816 likes and 349,127 talking about it).

Despite the show’s moral gray area, the social media craze surrounding “Scandal” has made it one of the top-rated shows on TV thanks in large part to an interactive social media campaign.